Timminz wrote:I'd love to see this implemented, but for my own account. An email notification when I'm down to 2 hours in any game would be very useful on those days when life just seems to demand more of my time than I had anticipated.

If implemented for sitters, it would just make the already-happening abuse, even easier to do. Terrible idea.

Again, I must disagree. Those who abuse any system will always find ways to abuse. Making it easier or more difficult does not increase nor decrease the amount of abuse.

I managed a very large network for a major corporation. We had employees who abused the network and those who did not and I kept statistics on this. No changes made to the network that made said abuse easier or more difficult had any statistically significant impact on the amount of abuse. The only thing I ever found to have any impact was to fire an abuser and let all the employees know that he/she had been fired for abuse. But even that was a fleeting victory as within 4-6 weeks, abuse was back to its normal levels.

From real world experience, backed up by real world statistics, making any system easier or more difficult to abuse has NO effect on the amount of abuse of that system.

I'd love to see these "real world statistics". Mind sharing?

Seriously though, "it's okay to make abusing the system easier, because making it more difficult won't deter the abuse", isn't a very good argument.

While we're at it though, we should stop checking for multis, because you know, making it easier to operate multiple accounts isn't going to encourage abuse of the system.

I hate the fact that I cannot produce those statistics for you. But even if I still worked for that company, they would not allow me to share. They consider all such data and information as proprietary because it might give them a competitive edge. So apologies for even mentioning it.

And I see your point on making abuse easier. Case in point, even though it is impossible to stop a hacker from breaking into your network, we worked very hard to put every possible prevention in place.

So then the question that you [and I believe Bones as well] would like addressed here is, will this suggestion, if implemented, make abuse of the system easier? At the moment, I don't know. So, what I will do is to ponder that for a bit, reread all posts here, and get back to you.

I posit that there are differing levels of threats. IMHO, multis are a bigger 'threat' to CC than sitting abuse. would you agree or disagree with that and why?

OK guys. I pondered… I reread all the posts… I pondered some more… I reread the posts again… I pondered…. And I have my answer, my response… My suggestion will not increase abuse at all! None! Zero increase of abuse! And being the generous soul that I am, I will tell you why

It will not increase abuse because all use of this technique can be MONITORED by the admins!!! Anyone abusing the system by using this method will be caught and appropriate sanctions taken! The guys that figure out how to abuse a system might be many things, but they ain’t stupid! And they won’t use a system that can be monitored for abuse! So guys, this will not increase abuse, not even by a tiny bit.

Baby-Bjorn wrote:It will not increase abuse because all use of this technique can be MONITORED by the admins!!! Anyone abusing the system by using this method will be caught and appropriate sanctions taken! The guys that figure out how to abuse a system might be many things, but they ain’t stupid! And they won’t use a system that can be monitored for abuse! So guys, this will not increase abuse, not even by a tiny bit.

And where will the admins get enough time to constantly monitor such a tool? Don't you think it would be much more efficient for the site to develop an account sitting tool that doesn't require any monitoring at all?

Baby-Bjorn wrote:It will not increase abuse because all use of this technique can be MONITORED by the admins!!! Anyone abusing the system by using this method will be caught and appropriate sanctions taken! The guys that figure out how to abuse a system might be many things, but they ain’t stupid! And they won’t use a system that can be monitored for abuse! So guys, this will not increase abuse, not even by a tiny bit.

And where will the admins get enough time to constantly monitor such a tool? Don't you think it would be much more efficient for the site to develop an account sitting tool that doesn't require any monitoring at all?

It should not be difficult to setup an auto monitor. Just decide what your triggers and thresholds are and let the computer do it. That would actually take less programming effort than doing t6he implementation of the suggestion. Then the auto monitor just PMs the designated admin[s] when it triggers. Easy. I setup a very similar auto monitor that tracked every web site visited by the users and triggered an alert to me when anyone hit 5 porn sites in a calendar month. Our policy was up to 4 in a month could happen by accident. Whitehouse.com got a lot of people who were trying to go to whitehouse.GOV heh. The auto monitor could be set to any threshold. it just read a number in a file. How many users abused the web? In 7 years, just one. And the auto monitor caught him. It was a Saturday [I had the monitor setup to notify me on my PDA]. I looked at the message and immediately called the guys manager and the problem was handled. And once the basic monitor tool was working, it was easy to add different things to monitor for, each with its own triggers and thresholds. For example I monitored for gaming sites and tracked the number of sites visited and amount of time spent on each. Lots of people play games from work. On my network they were 'caught'. That was actually a more pervasive problem than porn.

As for a tool that requires no monitoring, what's your idea? I would love to hear it.

Personally I am a huge proponent of monitoring tools. They take very little time and e3ffort to set up and then you just let them run. You put all the variables into a text file that can be easily edited to change triggers and/or thresholds. Anything that is currently manually monitored can [there are some exceptions] be auto monitored by computers. And as newer and better software tools and techniques continue to evolve, the number of exceptions shrink.